THE AUTOPSY

Lyudmila Ulitskaya

- Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Kogan loved his atrocious work, especially those of his dead who left at the proper time—old, weary of life, bald, having lost lush growth in armpits and crotches, their well-worn feet knobbly and calloused, their breasts and scrotums sagging. Slowly pulling on his chain-mail gloves, he looked over a petrified body, an unread book, and formed a first superficial impression, evaluating the body according to a gauge known to him alone—whether the dead man had died at his allotted time or had failed to live to the limit set him by nature. Those who lived well beyond that limit he called “the forgotten,” and he was a little worried about himself joining their number. He did not like to dissect children and young women, preferring his reliable and lawful contingent.

Shortly before their divorce, Kogan’s first wife, a gynecologist, said to him a phrase he never forgot: Only a pathological type can choose the profession of pathoanatomist. . . . Women’s foolishness. A pathoanatomist, in Kogan’s mind, was a priest of pure corporeality, the last caretaker of the temple abandoned by the soul. By contrast, his second wife, Ninochka, was a librarian and did not even know the word “autopsy.” And that was wonderful.

A careful autopsy usually took two hours. And during that time he was able to read the history of a life, as doctors read the history of an illness. Beyond the body of a feeble or slightly obese child splayed on a zinc table, his intelligent eye saw all the measles and scarlet fevers, the puberty crisis, the healed broken bones, the small traumas. . . .